TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPES II

Idealization of nature, industrialization of resources, destruction of environment.

Transforming Landscapes takes the ideal of another era, Romanticism, as a starting point to talk about sustainability and landscape nowadays. Romanticism seen as a critical response to a world of disillusionment, towards life that modern rationalism found as a constituent of the new society. A form of resistance to the excesses of enlightened rationalism that gave rise to monsters involved in progress.

The soundscape and the tuning of the world, the idea of the universe as musical composition has a history that goes from Pythagoras to John Cage. At the end of the 20th century, R.Murray Schafer proposed an empirical approach to this idea, and since then the works around the soundscape (a term coined by the author in this book) have not stopped growing. Schäfer conceives the soundscape as an ecosystem composed of all the acoustic events in the world, the complete catalog of noises and sounds among whom we live. For the author, the soundscape of the world is a musical composition that unfolds without ceasing us around and that we should be not only its auditorium, but also its composers and performers. At the bottom of this matter, we will find music theory but also the acoustics, anthropology, sociology, art, architecture and the study of the symbolism of sounds.